Svchost.exe Hogging 100% cpu

I have an Acer Aspire 5532 I'm working on. It has an AMD Athlon TF-20 cpu with 3.00 GB memory. It's running 64-bit Windows 7 HP SP1.

I recently went through the malware cleaning process and it looks like things got cleaned up nicely!

After getting things cleaned up, I installed some protection, removed some unneeded programs and was trying to get things back in order. I noticed that things were running slowly. IE would come up but pages took forever to load, and then sometimes only loading partially. Other programs like CCleaner would take forever to scan. Everything window seemed to load one payne at a time.

I also brought up Windows Update to see what needed taken care of and found about 150 or so updates available. I've been spending the last available hours loading updates but even that is drawn out. I only let it update 1 or 2 updates at a time.

But all during this time, I've had the feeling that something was running in the background that was hogging cycle time. I brought up task manager and looked under the "Performance" tab to see the CPU Usage at between 90 and 100%. From there, I brought up the "Resource Monitor" and found that all this CPU usage is mainly from "svchost.exe (netsvcs)".

I downloaded "ProcessExplorer" to see what services are being ran by this svchost but I don't find anything out of the ordinary. Windows Update and TrustedInstaller seem to hog most of the cpu time but I figure it's going to during the Update process. I visited "Black Viper" and compared the "services" settings with most in the recommended state.

My questions are...when I complete all the recommended Updates, will the cpu "maxing out" quit? Is this normal for having this many updates available? Is there maybe some corrupt services?

 

Open Task Manager > Processes. Check Show processes from all users. Right-click the svchost.exe that's hogging the CPU and click Go to Service(s). Write down the Description of all services associated with that svchost.exe, and post.

 

Here you go!

 

Thanks.
You have 2 services running which I don't have.

Browser - Computer Browser.

BITS - Background Intelligent Transfer Service.

Computer Browser's service you can set to Manual - it will start when needed. But this is not hogging the CPU.

TrustedInstaller (Windows Modules Installer) and BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) are almost certainly the culprits. Because you use Windows Update (I don't) you can't disable them. As a check, disable them and restart your PC.
Don't forget to re-enable them.

 

Yes, you are correct in that once the services are disabled, the cpu usage goes way down.

Now, what do you think about setting the priority of the process lower? I was playing around with Process Explorer and lowered the priority to,

"background: 4 (Low I/O and Memory Priority)"

Once I did that, svchost.exe dropped to 1-2% average cpu, and overall averaging total usage around 30%! Problem is, once I reboot, the priority goes back to default and cpu usage goes back up to 100%.

But anyway, what do you think about changing the priority and making it permanent?

 

Process Explorer from Sysinternals is a professional program. But, I cannot recommend a program that changes the way Windows does things. The onus is on you. I can only hope Adrynalyne sees this post. Keep in mind, whatever you change, as soon as Windows starts to download updates, you'll be back at where you were.

What CPU and RAM do you have?

 

The CPU is a AMD Athlon TF-20 1.6Gz

and it looks like,

Bank0 2147483648 DIMM0
Bank0 1073741824 DIMM1

 

I have a 1.8 GHz CPU and 3 GB RAM. Because I don't use Windows updates (which is responsible for hogging your CPU), it's impossible for me to advise you.

IMHO, you have 2 options:

1. Try the Process Explorer option - it's entirely up to you.
2. Close all programs and download and install the Windows updates.

 

In the meanwhile, while I'm trying to figure this out, option 2 is what I'm doing!

The Process Explorer thing seems to work "somewhat". Since it's not permanent with this program, I play with it while downloading updates. Sometimes it seems to work and others...no so much. I'll keep looking around and I have found many others with this similar issue. Maybe when the downloads are complete, the system will rest!

Thanks for your time and BTW, how are you downloading windows updates if your not using "Windows Update"?

 

I don't.